Nikolski (13 page)

“I beg your pardon?” Noah stammers.

“This university is a conservative institution. To survive you need a respectable specialization. You want
to work on garbage dumps? Well, first you have to make the grade in a less contentious area. Indigenous prehistory is an excellent training ground. Besides, I happen to be in need of an assistant!”

Noah can feel his head start to spin. The irony seems to be just too much.

“I adore indigenous prehistory,” he hears himself answering.

NOAH IS ROOTED IN FRONT OF A MAILBOX
. He is closely examining the strata of graffiti and stickers covering the sides of it.
Punk’s Not Dead
¡Viva Zapata!
Lose Thirty Pounds in Thirty Days
—messages that go to the heart of North American civilization. He wonders what archaeologists will think when they unearth this mailbox in three thousand years. Will they grasp the function of this object, or will they believe they have found an altar of some obscure, minor sect?

There are pedestrians hurrying by, brushing past him. A bad spot for daydreaming. He wipes the sweat from his forehead and pulls three envelopes out of his shirt pocket. He has written more than five hundred letters to his mother over the last four years, and he knows by heart the postal code of even the smallest post office between Lake of the Woods and Whitehorse. According to his calculations, Sarah must right now be prowling the vicinity of Lesser Slave Lake, so the three letters are addressed to General
Delivery in Little Smoky (
T0H
2Z0
), Triangle (
T0G 1E0
) and Jean Côté (
T0H 2E0
).

He throws the letters into the mailbox and crosses the street, wondering what the weather may be like in the southern Yukon. Behind the heavy glass doors of the library the temperature is decidedly Greenlandian. The door closes slowly and the heat wave is soon reduced to a faint simmer on the other side of the glass.

Noah crosses the deserted hall and passes the book-loan counter, where the clerk is reading
La Route d’Altamont.
Near the photocopiers he chances upon a big bearded man occupied with some strange business. He has emptied the recycling bin onto the floor and is in the process of arranging hundreds of spoiled photocopies into different piles.

“Tom Saint-Laurent!” Noah cries out happily. “What are you doing?”

“Well, as you can see, I’m analyzing the recycling bins.”

“I thought you were in the Laurentians on a fishing trip.”

“I was,” he confirms, with a troubled look. “But wouldn’t you know it, yesterday afternoon, while I was waiting for the trout to bite, I began to think about paper. Have you ever asked yourself what ratio of information these recycling bins contain? What it is that people photocopy? What they throw away and
why? What proportion of virgin paper goes directly into recycling?”

He waves a thick stack of paper that has gone through the viscera of the photocopy machines without receiving a speck of polymer-carbon.

“What fascinating refuse—virgin paper! ‘Anti-refuse’ would be a more accurate term, seeing how it ends up in the trash without having been used. And not just anti-refuse but ‘anti-artifact’ too—an object that in itself conveys no information.”

“So what you’re saying is, you jumped into your four-by-four and drove back to Montreal to do some anti-archaeology in the recycling bins.”

“Actually, I was just about bored to tears. Fishing isn’t really my thing … What about you? What are you doing here in the middle of July?”

“This is the best air conditioning in town,” Noah says, leaving Thomas Saint-Laurent to his research and heading up to the fifth floor.

As an apprentice archaeologist, Noah would ordinarily be expected to work in Section EF (American History) or Section G (Geography and Anthropology), but he prefers the tranquility of Section V (Naval Sciences, Travel Narratives and Sea Serpents). Even during the worst end-of-term rush, this forgotten corner on the last floor remains the most underused part of the library. Once the term is over, hardly anyone ever goes there—not even a librarian or a janitor—and you
can spend weeks there without meeting another soul. No busybodies or snoops or spies. You’re free to gaze at the ceiling and daydream, scribble a few poems, doze off on the table, read anything you like any way you like, including shirtless.

Noah has made a personal haven out of a large mahogany table located in the very centre of the floor. For months now he’s been leaving his books, papers, pencils and glasses there, as if this piece of furniture were reserved exclusively for his use. But today, quite unexpectedly, Noah finds that a girl has dropped anchor at this very spot.

Stunned, he stands motionless. He glances around in every direction. The floor is deserted, a veritable Sahara of empty tables. Why has this girl chosen to sit
right there
and not somewhere else? Noah becomes suddenly aware of harbouring certain territorial instincts, a paradoxical feeling for someone who was raised at an average speed of sixty kilometres per hour.

Why has he become so attached to this table?

If Sarah were to pop up, like a genie rising out of an old silvery trailer, she would advise him simply to share the space with the girl, or else to collect his books and go colonize another corner of the library. After all, there are four more floors available, not counting the stairwells, the closets and the washrooms. But Sarah isn’t there, and Noah approaches gingerly, wondering
what the best way to handle this might be. Make himself at home? Beat a retreat? Fake indifference? Act like a tormented intellectual? Claim his territory?

He sits down.

No reaction. The table floats on a sea of silence. Noah fidgets in his chair and coughs. The girl finally looks at him, greets him with a brief smile and immediately reimmerses herself in her reading.

Okay,
Noah soberly says to himself.

While pretending to sort his papers, he observes his new neighbour. She has long black hair, somewhat almond-shaped eyes, and little reading glasses. A model student. She has scattered a number of bulky volumes over her territory:
La souveraineté canadienne dans le Grand Nord, The High Arctic Relocation, Culture inuit et politique internationale.
Clearly, no one on this floor takes the least interest in sea serpents.

The day passes uneventfully. Noah reads, or rather, Noah pretends to read, unable to take his eyes off the girl’s olive-skinned forearms, her angular wrists, her restless hand penning what looks like old Italian, backwards, in a small notebook. “A lefty!” he thinks jovially.

A little before noon, the stranger goes away, leaving her things behind. Noah watches her disappear behind the stacks, hesitates for a moment and then grabs the notebook. To his great surprise, everything is written in Spanish. Noah can’t help smiling.

A Spanish-speaking student doing research on the Far North in the Naval Sciences section?

Well, why not?

After that, the girl arrives every morning with the regularity of a celestial event. At eight a.m. she walks through the library’s glass doors and sits down at an Internet station. She reads the international news, paying special attention to South America and Chiapas, and jots down some notes in her little spiral notebook.

At eight-thirty she consults the library catalogue and transforms the issues she wants to focus on that day into bibliographical citations. Then she crisscrosses the library, moving from one section to another with a pile of books rapidly growing in her arms.

At around eight forty-five, she comes to Section V with her loot. She piles the books on the table, puts on her glasses as though she were putting on a diving suit, and plunges into her reading.

When Noah shows up, fifteen minutes later, all that can be seen of the girl are the air bubbles frothing at the surface. She gets up from her chair only to renew her supply of books, to stretch or to get a quick sandwich in the basement cafeteria.

She keeps up her marathon until she is driven out by the closing bell at eight forty-five p.m., at which point
she disappears from the surface of the planet, apparently sucked into the void, only to be returned to the real world the next morning, when the library reopens. The lapse between nine p.m. and eight a.m. is the Bermuda Triangle.

The days roll by. Noah and the girl still share the big mahogany table. Little by little, the boundary lines between their territories have blurred. Their books mingle and a tacit familiarity arises, made up of silences, rustling sounds and discreet glances. After a week, Noah finds it natural to ask her, “So, what are you working on?”

The girl lifts her nose out of her book and glances around, blinking her eyes as though she were taking her first break in six months.

“The relocations in the remote Arctic.”

Five accents are interwoven in these six words: the haughty tone of the Caracas bourgeoisie, the diphthongal speech of Montreal, the haste of Madrid, the nasal intonation of New York and some traces of a recent visit to Chiapas. Where could she be from?!

“Relocations?” Noah asks, with the deliberate aim of hearing that indefinable accent once again.

Arching her back, she yawns slowly.

“Does Inukjuak mean anything to you?”

“It’s an Inuit village on Hudson Bay, isn’t it?”

“Precisely. In 1953, the Canadian government relocated a number of families from Inukjuak to two artificial villages: Resolute and Grise Fiord. Near the seventy-fifth parallel. So far north that in December the sun stops coming up.”

“Why were they relocated?”

“Because of famine. That, at any rate, was the official reason. Last year, the Makivik Corporation filed a complaint with the Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples. They claim famine was a pretext. The government only wanted to shore up its sovereignty in the Far North … What is it? Why are you smiling?”

“It’s nothing.”

“You have an opinion on the subject?”

“It seems like the deportation of the Acadians in reverse.”

“That’s a funny sort of opinion.”